Jack the Young Trapper: An Eastern Boy's Fur Hunting in the Rocky Mountains

by George Bird Grinnell

CHAPTER XIII

A LION'S LEAP

A cool breeze was blowing down from the mountains, and although the sun was warm it was not uncomfortably hot. Here and there little wisps of smoke drifted from points on the mountainside where some old log was still smouldering, but the fire as a whole seemed to have been extinguished by the rain. Away down to the south the mountainsides were all black, and from the border of the burned country great tongues of the same dark color here and there stretched out into the green timber that clothed the unburned mountainside, showing where the onrushing flames had scorched the tops of the pine trees; but to the north of this the timber was still brightly green.

Before Jack had gone far, the valley grew narrower and the hills on either side higher. On his side of the stream the bluffs now drew closer to the willows, and were occasionally broken down into Bad Land shapes, where no grass grew and where the clay was deeply guttered by the rain.

In the ravines, which at short intervals broke through these steeper bluffs, grew huge old cottonwoods, not very tall, but thick, and with gnarled, twisted branches. Evidently at some seasons of the year great quantities of water passed down through these ravines, for their beds were deeply washed.

In the valley and on the hillsides Jack saw many antelope, but there was meat enough in camp to last them for a day or two, and it hardly seemed to him worth while to kill anything. "At least," he thought, "if I do fire a shot, I will wait until I have started back toward the camp, so that I can carry the meat with me as I go in."

As he went on he kept watching the willows to his left, thinking that at any time a white-tail deer might appear among them, and he kept an equally good lookout on the bluffs and up the ravines to his right, where there was always a possibility of seeing a black tail or even a mountain sheep.

He was standing looking up one of these ravines, watching a doe antelope that had been feeding there, which, having seen him, was trotting off further up the ravine, when, without the slightest warning, as the doe was passing under the branches of a huge old cottonwood that grew on the border of the watercourse, something yellow sprang out from the branches of the tree, and descending on the doe, struck her to the ground. Although she was a long way off, Jack could hear her bawl in fright, and he instantly saw that a panther had been resting among the branches of this tree, and had sprung at the doe as she passed by.

The doe and the panther were in plain sight as he stood there, but dropping to the ground he crept swiftly to a little coulée which led down to the bottom of the ravine, and running down this, he started up the ravine as fast as he could. The watercourse was narrow, its sides steep, and its bottom entirely dry. The big cottonwood from which the panther had leaped was the first one in the ravine, and by watching its branches he could tell when it would be necessary for him to begin to go cautiously in order to creep up and get a shot at the great cat. For the most part, the bed of the ravine was covered with sand, over which he could run noiselessly, but every little while he came to a bed of drift pebbles, and here he felt obliged to go more slowly. Presently the towering crown of the great cottonwood came in sight again, now not more than seventy-five yards distant, and Jack began to look for a place where he could climb up the steep banks of the ravine to get a shot. In a moment more a little side wash gave him the opportunity that he sought, and clambering up four or five feet of broken-down clay, he found himself in a coulée, which furnished an easy way to the level ground above. Taking advantage of another little side wash that came in, he presently found himself on the level ground where the cottonwood stood, and looking through the sage brush, he tried to catch a glimpse of the panther. For a moment or two he could see nothing of it, but then something white caught his eye, and raising his head a little higher, he saw the white breast and belly of the doe, and the panther stretched out beside her with his teeth apparently fixed in her neck.